


god is here behind my wheel

by mercuria



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Darkest Timeline, Gen, Topher losing his mind, Topher/Bennett if you squint, Topher/anyone if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 13:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3328376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuria/pseuds/mercuria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-canon. Boyd creates the happy family he's been craving, but life in the United States of Apocalypse is not exactly all it's cracked up to be.</p><p>(Or, "In which Topher comes unhinged, Adelle is running out of options, and Boyd fails to learn a valuable lesson.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	god is here behind my wheel

**Author's Note:**

> I just watched the whole series for the first time last week and I love it! Thanks so much to my horrible friends for accompanying me on this Dollhouse adventure and encouraging me to write the worst fic I could think of.

Topher has this persistent dream.

In the dream, he’s at some swanky Rossum dinner. The windows are floor-to-ceiling glass, the tables are glass, the food might be glass for all he knows. Everything’s got an unreal sparkle.

He thinks he can see Bennett across the room. But every time he tries to get up to go talk to her, hands clamp over his shoulder and force him down. 

“This is your night, Topher,” avuncular voices chorus, drowning out his protests.

“But I have to—“

“You’ve earned this. You can relax now.”

Bennett is standing by the window, her back to him. There are fireworks going off across the L.A. skyline, a blooming, poppy-colored display. But as Topher watches, he realizes he’s not looking at fireworks.

It’s flames.

_Bennett knows how to fix it. Bennett and I can fix it, together—_

Topher struggles to move, but the congratulating hands hold him in place.

“It’s your night, sport. Enjoy it.”

 

Of course, when he wakes up, Bennett is dead.

 

+

 

Bennett is dead, and the room he’s in has windows. Not windows that let you see outside, which aren’t exactly a feature of the server room and might actually make it _harder_ for him to sleep at this point in his life—they’re windows out into the hall, providing a clear view of antiseptic chrome. Their most important feature is not that they let you see out, but that they let other people (Boyd) see in. 

Home, sweet bunker. 

When he wakes up, Adelle is stroking his hair. 

“You had another nightmare,” she murmurs.

Topher laughs, shaky.

“It had its positive aspects.” He smiles up at her, the corners of his mouth twitching. “I saw Bennett.”

Adelle’s face falls. Though it’s not really that it falls; more like her mind is already under layers of rock and sediment, and keeps finding deeper places to go. Topher can relate.

And … man, relating.

 _That’s_ weird.

 

Boyd sends for one or both of them, usually at mealtimes but not always. Topher assumes it’s at mealtimes because there are usually meals, though his stomach almost always churns too much to allow him to eat. Food is not a problem for Rossum: Boyd takes pride in lecturing them on its provenance, its varieties, whether it was grown hydroponically or in a secure aboveground facility. It makes Topher’s head spin.

Adelle eats politely, classily. With precision. She eats like she’s measured every calorie and knows exactly how much energy it’ll take to see her to tomorrow.

“Delicious, Mr. Langton,” she says, and means, _fuck you very much for everything_. Topher giggles.

Boyd tells Topher he has to eat.

“You’ve got to, Topher. Keep your strength up.” Boyd frowns at him, and Topher wishes he could stop thinking of him as _Boyd_. Man-friend is right out, of course, since Boyd’s pretty much disqualified himself from the friendship category, and he’s nowhere near British enough to pull off Adelle’s effortlessly contemptuous ‘Mr. Langton.’ ‘Your Corporate Evilness’ has a ring to it, though. Definite potential.

What were they talking about again?

Topher tunes back in as Adelle says, “Don’t think about doing it for him. Do it for you.” When Topher’s hand doesn’t move, and the dull-edged utensils stay mute on either side of his plate, she says, “Please.”

Later, he hears them arguing in the hall outside his room. Very acoustic, that hall. Must be all the chrome.

“—mind is the only part of him you care about,” Adelle snaps.

“And you don’t care enough,” His Corporate Evilness replies. 

Hmm. Not as satisfying as Topher had hoped. He’ll keep brainstorming.

“Pardon me if I don’t give that assessment a moment’s credence.”

“Topher Brink has a moral capacity no one dreamed of—not even Topher. But right now, it’s overwhelming him.”

“Perhaps it would be better if we could program it out of him,” Adelle retorts.

Topher wants to shout into the hallway that this could actually be a pretty easy fix: Isolating the part of the brain responsible for producing what people think of as moral feeling involves waaaay fewer components than you might imagine. Fiddle around with the orbital cortex, keep its activity low and limit its communication with the amygdala, and bingo! Instant sociopath, just add water.

There’s an outside chance he’d turn into an id-driven maniac, though.

“If we don’t do something,” His Unfriendful Boydness says, “we’re gonna lose him.”

“We? _We’re_ going to lose him?” Adelle laughs sharp enough to break glass. “You never had him in the first place; you lying, treacherous—“ 

So, Apocalypse Mom and Apocalypse Dad are fighting, and Topher buries his face in his pillow to try not to hear. This doesn’t work so well, though.

For one thing, he can’t find a way to shut out his thoughts.

 

+

 

What is the sensation of your mind unhooking?

 _Unhinged_ is the colloquial term, and Topher can see it—like a door that doesn’t work, or a lid that won’t close. Most of what we think of as mental illness (hell, illness in general) is more of a failure to sync: Your brain can’t tell you how to produce enough serotonin, enough dopamine, to keep you on balance.

Boyd, to his credit, is trying to hinge him. 

He and Topher share manly silent chats, or at least they’d be silent if Topher could keep from rambling. He mostly thinks out loud, always has, and he can’t stop himself now—especially without a laptop or even a whiteboard to contain his thoughts. Boyd the Great and Powerful listens, fingers steepled, and doesn’t interrupt.

“How did you _do_ it?” Topher says one day. At Boyd’s uncomprehending mild look, he starts to gesticulate. “You, you, you acted like you hated the whole thing. The Dollhouse, what we did—what I did.” 

“It had to be done,” Boyd replies.

“That is … the biggest non-answer to evernot be an answer.” Academically, Topher notes that he hasn’t stopped moving his hands; he watches his fingers flutter almost as if he’s not controlling them. 

Though he is controlling them.

He’s pretty sure if he stopped to test, that’s what he’d find.

“I wanted to see how you’d all develop,” Boyd says. “How you’d grow. I thought you’d be best served if you had a foil.” He spares Topher an indulgent smile. “But I admit, it was difficult at times. Watching you work without being able to voice my admiration.”

That stops him short, and now, now, _now_ Topher gets how Boyd looks at him. Like he, Topher, is something Boyd created; something he invented.

Like he’s an interesting toy. 

But of course, why _just_ have Dolls, when you can have other dolls that animate those Dolls, puppeteer puppets to pull the puppet-strings? Why stop? If you’re the head of Rossum, the whole world is your sandbox, isn’t it?

Later, when he tells Adelle, he has to laugh about it. 

“It was a _meta_ Dollhouse,” he says. “All of us, all this time. Get it?”

Adelle gives him a look that is one part sharp to two parts pity, and doesn’t seem to find it as funny as Topher does. Topher is used to people not understanding him when he talks, so he doesn’t think much of it.

 

+

 

He runs the math one night. 3.796 million residents in the city of Los Angeles (as of the most current census data). 8.19 million in New York, 2.698 million in Chicago, 7.56 million in London, 37 million in Tokyo. Add it all together, and the most plugged-in cities in the world yield 59.244 million identities ready to get scrambled like eggs.

It’s a handy snapshot of his urban carnage. The question is, how does he undo what he’s not sure has been done yet? That requires time, space, infrastructure—which he has here, sort of, barring the tiny issue where they won’t let him _at_ the infrastructure anymore. Maybe if he tells Boyd he’s drunk the Kool-Aid, gotten on the gravy train, he’ll let him use some of it again. All hail Our Lord of the Cerebral Remix. 

_Focus, Topher._

Except when he tries, all he can think of is those numbers attached to names and faces. Mothers with children. (One hundred seventy thousand two hundred and three, one hundred seventy thousand two hundred and four.) Waiters in restaurants. (One hundred seventy thousand two hundred and five, six, seven, eight, nine for the hostess.) In his mind’s eyes, the numbers look like glowing dots, mapped onto bodies that won’t stand still long enough for him to solve the problem.

_If you guys could just hold up for like, one second—_

Topher stays awake, whispering equations, until Adelle comes to get him for breakfast.

 

+

 

The vaccine is coming along, Boyd confides to them—though, Topher gathers, not as quickly as he’d anticipated.

“Where is Echo?” Adelle asks. She’s starting to sound tired, and her hair has lost some of its stalwart curl. (There are no utensils at her place setting, and haven’t been since she tried to stab Boyd in the neck with her fork.)

Boyd smiles.

“Echo is not as cooperative as we’d hoped. We’re keeping her in solitary until she calms down.”

Adelle snorts. “And are the rest of us as cooperative as you’d hoped?”

“Don’t talk to me,” Topher says distractedly. He’s trying to estimate how many CPAs there are in L.A. county, and what percentage of those will pick up the phone. “I’m figuring something out.”

He feels both of their eyes on them, and feels rather than sees Adelle’s lips tug down.

 

“Where’s Dr. Saunders?” Topher asks, dragging a hand through his hair.

Boyd watches him implacably.

“ _I’m_ not a doctor, dammit.” Topher can’t get the inflection quite right. “You had a medical doctor, but you—did I program Claire to fall in love with you?”

“Claire made her own choices,” Boyd says gently. “Just like we all did.”

“Nooo, no no. No.” Topher holds up a pausing finger. He’s not sure he believes choices can be your own anymore. You definitely can’t keep them cooped up like pigeons; they’ve got ways of deviating from anticipated flight patterns. “Because something’s always got to give, so if I programmed her to hate me, I must have programmed her to love someone else, and _love_ is a whole different set of variables. I mean, love is, it makes you—crazy—“

He stares up at Boyd.

“Oh God,” he says. “She wasn’t a sleeper.”

Boyd neither confirms nor denies.

But he doesn’t have to do either.

“God,” Topher breathes, “ _I_ programmed Dr. Saunders to kill—“

The words swallow themselves. Topher’s background hum of counting bodies stalls out, replaced with a full-body tremble that sounds like _Bennett, Bennett, Bennett, Bennett_.

All these faces he imagines, all the people whose lives he may as well have personally erased, and the one who sticks in his gut is Bennett. Just one girl.

One adorable, crazy hot, crazy genius-level smart girl, saying _I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ —

“Topher.” Boyd’s hands are warm and strong as they take his shoulders. “You need to get ahold of yourself.”

Topher shakes his head. Ending the world is one thing, but ending _Bennett_ —

"The vaccine is almost ready. Echo will come around.” Boyd sounds confident beneath his concern, satisfied. As if he's thought of everything. “And we're going to stay ourselves."

A mean, brittle piece of Topher thinks, _You can't make me._

 

+

 

“I’m sorry,” Topher says when he’s alone, through shuddering tears, “I’m sorry Bennett, I’m so sorry,” and Bennett says, _it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay._

He keeps checking her face for blood, but there’s no blood in his imagination; just Bennett, leaning down to kiss his forehead.

Smiling shyly, she says, _More of this if the world doesn’t end?_

And Topher chokes out a laugh.

“I, uh … I kinda think I threw a wrench in that one.”

Adelle stops in the door, frowning.

“Topher,” she says slowly, a note in her voice he doesn’t recognize. “Sweetheart. Who are you talking to?”


End file.
